Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Inserts (1974)

The first hurdle to get over when approaching
writer-director John Byrum’s strange little movie Inserts is trying to understand how the thing got made. Setting
aside the presence of leading man Richard Dreyfuss, who was on the rise in the
early ’70s thanks to American Graffiti
(1973), everything about Inserts
screams “uncommercial.” The piece unfolds like a play, with real-time
interaction between a small set of characters sprawling across a single
location for 117 minutes; the dense dialogue occasionally tips over into pretention;
and the film is filled with sex on every level, so even though the depiction of
physical encounters is not explicit, Inserts
borders on porn just for the sheer amount
of sexual content. (The MPAA slapped the picture with an X rating during its
original release.) Put succinctly, Inserts
is a North American movie that feels like a European art-house picture, and on
top of everything else, it’s dark as hell. Therefore, asking how the movie came
into being is futile. It was the ’70s, man.

Byrum takes viewers on a unique
journey, although chances are many viewers give up before the trip reaches its
destination—the weirdness factor is undoubtedly a turn-off for some. That said,
Inserts is full of intellectual and
visceral rewards for those who lock into Byrum’s bizarre frequency. Inserts is a movie about movies, but
it’s also about ambition, artistic hubris, emotional paralysis, manipulation,
and power—all of which are viewed through the prism of carnal knowledge.

Set in
the 1930s, Inserts takes place in the
mansion of Boy Wonder (Dreyfuss), a movie director whose career peaked in the
silent era. Boy Wonder drove himself out of the film business with diva
behavior, so now he makes his living by shooting stag reels in his own home—a
nice arrangement, seeing as how Boy Wonder has become a virtual recluse. Then
as now, the porn business attracts damaged souls, so Boy Wonder’s cast members
for the shoot depicted in Inserts are
Harlene (Veronica Cartwright), a heroin-addicted former mainstream movie
actress, and “Rex, the Wonder Dog” (Stephen Davies), a dimwit stud with violent
tendencies. Underwriting the whole affair is Big Mac (Bob Hoskins), a crude
gangster who hits the scene accompanied by Cathy (Jessica Harper), an intense
striver determined to break into movies no matter what it takes. As the story
progresses, Boy Wonder plays mind games on his actors to get work out of them.
Later, when tragedy strikes, Boy Wonder himself becomes the victim of mind
games.

Even though Inserts is in many
ways a film of ideas, giving away too much of the plot would be a disservice to
the piece, because the layers of character that get revealed with every plot
twist add to the richness of Byrum’s deranged tapestry. Every character is a
lost soul of some kind, so watching them grasp for solid ground makes for
fascinating sport. Not everything in Inserts
works, and the perverse nature of the material ensures that cynical viewers
will find the piece more credible than optimistic ones. Still, this is singular
work fueled by passionate acting.

Carwright nails a poignant mixture of naïveté
and world-weariness, while Harper presents a character who seems like a
skin-trade riff on All About Eve’s
Eve Harrington—the hungry young thing without a conscience. Hoskins is
effectively boarish and frightening, while Davies personifies the confusion of
a man unable to grasp the full dimensions of his own circumstances. As for
Dreyfuss, he’s incandescent, the complicated and precise nuances of his
performance mitigated only by the actor’s overpowering self-satisfaction. (Few
stars seem to relish their own skills as obviously as Dreyfuss does, though a
strong argument could be made that arrogance was the perfect choice of
emotional though-line for Boy Wonder.) Overall, Inserts is a deeply odd movie, given the juxtaposition of its lofty
literary style and its sleazy subject matter. Grim and insightful and macabre
and stylish and surprising, it’s a high-wire act performed in a sewer.